Beneath the Ink

by Tannara Young

Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

part 3

“I take it we’re not going to finish off in the carriage?” Adrin’s dry voice was flame to Lucas’s tinder.

“That was for show,” he snapped. “What we are going to finish is you telling me what is going on.”

“Well, you know most of it,” said Adrin. “The Padronelle seemed to think I had something to do with—”

“Save the lies,” said Lucas. “I saw you meet with that lord before they came.” He took a deep breath. “What’s more, I found the letter your cousin sent you.”

The darkness covered Adrin’s reaction to that. When he spoke after a moment, his voice sounded faintly puzzled. “The one from my cousin Marcus? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Meet contact at Saint’s Masquerade. Midnight,” quoted Lucas, keeping his voice very low.

This time he felt Adrin’s stillness. The silence stretched, but at last Adrin breathed, “How could you possibly know that?”

“No,” said Lucas. “I asked first. You are part of the rebellion, aren’t you?”

Adrin was silent again. “Why didn’t you tell the Padronelle if you suspected me?” he said at last.

“Because I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t know what to think. I just found out my husband is a rebel spy.”

“Yet your instinct is to lie and get me out of there rather than to run to the authority?”

Lucas couldn’t tell what Adrin was thinking. His voice was too low and controlled.

“I’m sorry, I’m not up on my etiquette,” he snapped. “I’m only a country bumpkin after all. I missed the lesson on how to report your husband for treachery at a fancy dress ball.”

Adrin moved suddenly, reaching out and catching Lucas’s hands. “Listen to me, Luc. I’m sorry that you feel I lied to you. I’ve been involved in the resistance for a long time. We... we believe that the emperor’s necromancy is wrong and unnatural. The stories about sylphyl slavery you hear whispered about are true. The Padronelle serve the emperor’s lust for power, wealth, and unnatural youth. They are very dangerous. We have proof of horrible things that are done in the emperor’s name, to say nothing of the dangerous imbalance of magic that his mages are creating.”

“Stop!” said Lucas, pulling away. “A simple ‘yes’ would suffice.”

Adrin followed his movement, continuing to grip his hands. “It wouldn’t suffice. I need you to know why I do this.”

“No, you don’t,” said Lucas. “You just hope that if you tell me why, I’ll agree not to report you. You never wanted me to know; don’t pretend you need me to know now.”

“You’re right, I don’t want you to tell, but I also want you to understand. I haven’t liked keeping secrets from you.”

“Just stop,” Lucas said again.

Adrin subsided and sat back, releasing Lucas’s hands. “Are you going to report me?” he asked quietly.

“No,” said Lucas. “Hells, I don’t know. I just don’t know, Adrin. I thought my life was one thing, but it’s not. I thought I knew who you were, but I don’t. More than that, I never did.

“Let me finish!” he snapped as Adrin began to speak. Lucas went to run his hand through his hair and encountered the mask. Suddenly sick of the idea of secrets and hiding, he tore the mask off and tossed it onto the seat.

“It’s not that I love the Padronelle, and I’m not stupid! I’ve heard the rumors about them and the emperor. But Adrin, is it worth risking everything? Your livelihood? Your friends? Me? Your very life? For what? What can you even do against that kind of power?”

“Then is it better to sit back complacently and do nothing?” said Adrin, a note of scorn in his voice. “Better to wring your hands and say, ‘Well, I’m not in pain, or poverty, or slavery, or being used for some horrible magical experiment, so I’ll just keep my head down and take advantage of the wealth and power of the Empire.’ That is not even doing nothing: that’s helping them. Even with all their power, if even half the people stood their ground and said, ‘Stop!’ things would change.”

Lucas took a quick breath. “There is nothing wrong with wanting to live a quiet life.”

“I don’t want to live a quiet life,” said Adrin. “Nor can I.”

“Yes, you can,” said Lucas. “You can be the man I married. The man that you said that you were when I fell in love with you. You wanted to know what I was going to do? Well, I’ll tell you. I won’t report you, but in return you will end your involvement. If you want to change the world, fine. Lobby the Citizen’s Council, hell, join the Citizen’s Council. Just nothing illegal!”

A muscle in Adrin’s jaw twitched as he clenched his teeth. When Lucas finished, he burst out, “The Citizen’s Council is a puppet of the Ministry of Culture. It’s a farce! They have done nothing! There is nothing they can do, even if they had the will do it. Don’t you see, Lucas! The only way is the rebellion.”

The carriage jerked to a halt, and they both caught their breath. A moment later the door opened. As they stared tensely out, their coachman frowned. “Sirs? We’re home.”

“Ah, thank you, Farris.” Adrin exited first, not pausing to offer a hand to Lucas as they sometimes did for each other. Lucas followed on his heels. The moment the front door shut behind them, Lucas said, “Not for you, not anymore!”

“Lord’s sake, Lucas.” Adrin rounded on him.

“No,” said Lucas. “You are a liar, Adrin, and I won’t have it. Don’t push me, because right now I am this close to turning you in. I trusted you, I cared for you! I counted myself lucky that you asked me to marry you. Did you think I would be some sort of easy mark? Don’t say anything more, Adrin, or you will find just how hard I can be.” He brushed past Adrin and headed up the stairs.

* * *

After the lovely weather for Midsummer, heat and humidity settled on the city like a damp, wool blanket. Lucas and Adrin remained tense and brittle. Adrin went out of his way to tell Lucas where he was going, or to ask if he might accept this invitation or that one. Lucas vacillated between wanting to watch him every moment and wanting to forget what he had learned and go back to happy ignorance.

As far as Lucas could tell, Adrin had obeyed his injunction to end his involvement with the rebels. He had burned the letter in front of Lucas. The only time Lucas tentatively tried to bring the subject up, Adrin had snapped, “I can’t talk about it and have nothing to do with it. Make up your mind, Lucas!” and stormed out of the room.

They were supposed to go to the mainland to visit Lucas’s sister, but several days before they left, Adrin woke with a fever and a hoarse cough. The doctor was summoned and prescribed bed rest.

“This is for the cough,” she said, placing a bottle beside the bed. “Take it; your lungs need the rest. I will come back tomorrow and see how you are doing.”

“Thank you,” Lucas replied, opening the door for her to leave. When he turned back to the bed, Adrin had closed his eyes and Lucas used the moment to study him. His cheeks looked drawn in, and there was a faint sheen of sweat on his brow.

Lucas sighed. He had been looking forward to this visit with his sister. There had been a time he had looked forward to showing Adrin his old haunts: the swimming hole in the abandoned quarry; the massive ancient oak he and Alaya climbed and pretended was their fortress, ship or secret hideout depending on their current game.

Adrin opened his eyes, catching Lucas staring. Before Lucas could look away, a faint smile touched his pale lips and he held out his hand. “I’m sorry I can’t make the trip to see your sister.”

Lucas sat and took the offered hand. “Don’t concern yourself. There will be another time. Do you want me to stay with you?”

“No!” This brought on another bout of coughing. Lucas poured a measure of the medicine the doctor had left into a tumbler and gave it to Adrin to sip. When he had recovered, he continued in a cautious tone, “I know how much you’ve been looking forward to this trip. You should go, Lucas. All I’ll be doing is sleeping anyway.” He shut his eyes and lay back, exhausted.

Lucas dithered. He wanted to get away, wanted to think about what had happened to his life. He wanted to talk it over with Alaya, but had no idea what he would say. He felt bad leaving Adrin when he was ill, but Dallan was a better nurse than he, and she ruled the sick room with a gentle but iron fist.

In the end, he agreed to go by himself. As he stood on the deck of the ferry and watched the city fall away — fading into a hazy gold bubble — confusion and a sense of unreality struck him. Was that place really his home? Was it as corrupt as Adrin had claimed?

The carriage ride was long and tedious and, when he finally arrived at the estate, the warm summer night had fallen. He stepped out into the familiar sound of crickets and the scent of cut grass and roses.

“It’s about time you arrived,” said Alaya. She sat perched invisibly in the crook of the sycamore that stood in the center of the circular drive before the door of the house. The coach driver started and swore as her shadowy figure dropped lightly from the branch, but Lucas jumped out of the carriage and threw his arms around her. The city was nothing: now he felt that he was home.

The eight days he spent with his sister was a mixture of the familiar and the surreal. His bedroom had been long ago stripped of his belongings. As he lay in bed at night, the proportions were the same, the squeaky window was the same and the arch of the linden tree outside was as well-known to him as his own hands. But the bed was not his, the wardrobe now stood on the other side of the room, and he kept walking into it in the dark.

He told Alaya the exciting parts of his new life: the new book of poetry he had published, the parties and dances, the fascinating salons where artists, writers and philosophers mingled to drink and discuss everything from the meaning of life to the cut of a new fashion. And always, in the back of his mind, on the tip of his tongue, there was that thing he didn’t say: “My husband is part of the rebellion. Or he was. Until I blackmailed him.”

On a day of soft winds and golden sunshine, he and Alaya took a picnic lunch into the woods and hiked to their old oak tree. As Alaya ran lightly ahead of him, Lucas tried to imagine her in the city. Her magic sense showed her where everything was, but she said she could always sense live things best. Certainly, here in the wood, she flitted from tree to tree, never even bruising a mushroom.

Her white eyes rimmed with black lashes were as familiar to Lucas as his own dark blue eyes. But in the city, would she be stared at? Whispered about? She had talked once about going to the University at Myri. He wondered if she still considered it. Or if she wanted to be married or have a family? That made him think of Adrin, and he sighed.

“What?” Alaya doubled back to meet him. “Tell me, Lucas. What are you hiding behind that sigh?”

Could he tell her? Instead, he said, “Do you still want to go to Myri?”

She froze for an instant, her stillness somehow painful.

“What is it, Laylay?”

She reached out without turning toward him and took his hand. “Lucas.” There was something in her voice that made his heart contract.

“What is it?”

“At the tree,” she said. She drew him swiftly down the path and then through the underbrush until they reached their tree. She brushed her hand across its rough bark in greeting and then swarmed up it, as agile as a squirrel. It had been a long time since Lucas climbed a tree and he followed more cautiously.

“I can’t go to Myri,” she said, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. “I thought I wouldn’t tell you, but I can’t. I have to, Lucas. I wanted to protect you, but I can’t lie to you, even by omission.”

“What are you talking about?” He didn’t like the distress in her voice.

“If I die, Lucas, you have to know I wanted to. That I chose to. Promise, you will let me go and be happy in your life.”

“If you die!” His voice startled a crow roosting above them and it flew away, cawing indignantly. “Laylay, what are you saying?” He swung up to the branch she was on, straddling it and grabbing her hand. “What in the hells do you mean?”

She was breathing quickly and gripped his hand so tightly it hurt. “I’ve been recruited by the Padronelle,” she said, and then let out a harsh breath. “Lady, I’ve been holding that so close.” She turned toward him. “No one knows. I have nine more days before they come for me. But I can’t, Lucas. I can’t be a part of them. I can’t let them turn my gift into something evil and perverted. I can’t become a spy or an assassin or a—”

“Calm down, Alaya!” he said. “Let me understand! The Padronelle have recruited you?”

“Because of my gift,” she said. “They told me what an honor it is, but Lucas, you know what they are. I would rather die.”

Lucas’s mind whirled. He did know. Or he had heard the rumors. He knew enough to be scared. He thought of those two men in the garden, the eagle-masked man who had danced with him at the ball. His sister as one of them? He had pushed away what he knew: even when confronted with Adrin’s passionate defense of the rebellion, he had shied away. Everybody he knew did, pretending the government wasn’t as bad as the rumors said: magical experiments, secret arrests, even human sacrifice for their necromantic enchantments.

But this was Alaya sobbing on his shoulder. This was his sister, who had nine days before they came for her. This was his twin who, if she said she would rather die than go with them, would find a way to take her own life.

Lucas cried too, clutching her tightly, forgetting the distance to the ground, forgetting his fight with Adrin, forgetting everything but his sister, shivering in his arms.

Crying lasted only so long.

Alaya wiped her eyes with the edge of her tunic and stood up, balancing on the branch on tip-toe. “Give me a minute,” she said. “I have to move.” She climbed higher in the tree and ran lightly down a huge limb that intersected with a nearby sycamore branch. Easy as a squirrel again, she leapt from one branch to the other and with a rustle of sycamore leaves, was hidden from sight.

Lucas wiped his own eyes, and fishing the bottle from the pack he had carried, took a sip of the pale golden wine.

He sat against the tree trunk staring at nothing.

* * *

Proceed to part 4...

Copyright © 2024 by Tannara Young

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